Saturday!

10101 things on sale at Steam. Out of the 19 various games on my wishlist, 17 are between 25% and 75% off. Stuff on the front page has a ton of 80% offs, some 85% offs, and I saw a couple 90% offs. At a glance, I see great deals for Dungeon of the Endless (awesome), Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic I&II (awesome), Mad Max is 66% off, Cities Skylines (for those of you who miss SimCity), FTL (freaking amazing), Shadowrun Returns (It’s three bucks!), and the Game of Thrones Telltale game that Maribou enjoyed so much is 66% off (bringing it down to ten buckaroos).

Without even mentioning Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (which remains my favorite RPG of all time). It’s down to five bucks.

However… my heart belongs to Fallout 4. Well, and Underrail (which, seriously, has some seriously old-schooly RPG mechanics… in the first five minutes, it feels like a game with serious replay value in the mold of the original Fallout). So I will probably only buy stuff in a flurry of panic right before the sale ends (and have daydreams of retiring).

Oooh, Plague Inc Evolved is down to 10 bucks too…

Anyway, if you see anything on major sale that we, seriously, need to drop a couple of bucks on, please let us know in comments.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission)

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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20 thoughts on “Saturday!”

I’ve lost enthusiasm for Fallout 4. The never-ending expanse of content has become demoralizing. I dealt with this in Skyrim by deciding on a build and specific goals for each run (OK, this time I’m going to focus on magic and complete the mage guild quests and all the daedric quests). But the customisation in Fallout 4 is so weak I’m not sure there even is such a thing as different builds, and the outside the main quest line, the quests don’t really break down into different groups.

Added to the fact that the changes to VATS make the combat stressful and unpleasant for me, and I think this might be the first Fallout game I don’t finish.

That sucks. I know what you mean about the builds, though. I’m making my tinker ninja sniper hacker saint and I feel like, by the end of the game, I’m going to have points in everything I pretty much would have ever wanted to put points into.

I took a look, but I’m not a huge fan of the post-apocalyptic setting (Fallout redeems itself through its humour and the fact that is more about society rebuilding after the collapse) and unremittingly grim is just not what I’m after in a setting. The setting elements in Fallout 4 were actually very nice, and a huge improvement on Fallout 3.

I tried two radically different builds, but it took a while before they were noticeably different. My main play through I focused on rifleman. I used a wide variety of weapons at first and it took some time before I was using non-automatic rifles exclusively.

I started with a stealth/melee/blitz character, with completely different starting SPECIAL and none of the same perks (so far). I know some people really enjoy that build, but found it kinda boring. It felt very passive. It’s just VATS->select->kill, over and over again. With my ranged character, I didn’t use VATS very often and aimed manually most of the time. I don’t think I’m going to continue with the character, at least perhaps not until the DLC comes out.

The only intentionality to my build was to max out intelligence early on. Most of my build afterwards has been beefing up SPECIAL rather than getting more than the modding and hacking perks.

Sniper-rifle shooting is definitely a ton of fun, especially if you can find or manufacture a weapon with the high-tech video scope and a range of 200+ meters. It’s possible to (for instance) get on top of the Saugus Steelworks and pick off Gunners on top of the Skyway with little vulnerability and test your ability to control the shots.

I’ve just started doing the Silver Shroud campaign, and it’s big fun using the costume and the character voice, although you can’t just stand there and unload on even the first bad guy with the prop machinegun. I’ve sent my sweetie-pie Piper away for a while to max out the Nick Valentine perks, so I don’t know if she can become the Mistress of Mystery along with me. But Nick is clearly enjoying the hell out of my adventures, too.

After being underwhelmed by Endless Space, I bypassed Endless Legend when it came out, but at 2/3 off I took a flyer and am so far damn glad I did.

I also got somewhat lucky in that I went online late enough that they’d already brought the Steam store down – I found out something was wrong when none of my Steam games would sync with the cloud – so I missed out on the opportunity to share my real name, address, and phone with a random dude in Russia.

Sanctuary ended up being my main settlement because I devoted so much time to it early on. I didn’t put much effort towards other settlements beyond basic necessities and didn’t actively recruit for them. I generally hate the settlement interface. I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to it, but I really hope some talented modder is able to completely revamp it into something much more user friendly.

The drive in is a good location. It’s closer to everything else, isn’t as spread out as Sanctuary, and doesn’t have the horrible-looking unscrappable houses everywhere. It has a nice, flat, clear, centralized building area.

It’s initially filled with radioactive waste. Get the Hazmat suit or some RadAway, go scrap the barrels for their steel, and the rads go away. Then you can put a water purifier in and you’re good to go. The drive-in screen makes an ideal back wall for a multi-story apartment complex.

Its central location and ready expandability has made the drive-in the hub of about half of my provisioning routes. The others radiate out from the Castle or Sanctuary.

The Pip-Boy summary interface listing what’s going on with each of the settlements is buggy and doesn’t report happiness or trouble areas accurately. Defense should equal food + water + power.

I’m expanding into the drive-in now. Plan to turn it mostly into a farm. Need more corn! And for some reason, my two plots of razorgrain are simply never bearing fruit. Someone may be harvesting it, though.

So I’ve mentioned that the last gaming systems I engaged with were the PS1 and N64. I have a PS3, but only ever used it for blu-rays and streaming video.

Well, my six-year old has become obsessed with Minecraft and wanted the “Story Mode” game, as well as the full game edition that lets you do things you can’t do on the iOS version, and begged for an Xbox for Xmas.

I figured we’d save some bucks and just put this PS3 to work instead, and so we got those, as well as the Lego Movie Game (just TYPING that corporate synergy transmogrification makes my head hurt).

What I’ve learned is that even though he’s not very good, my six year old is an inveterate trash-talker when he plays. Which is really irritating.

So obviously, the proper way to teach him a lesson, is to wait until he goes to bed and practice while he sleeps, so that I can ABSOLUTELY CRUSH HIM NEXT TIME.